How You Can Be Certain that the Bible is the Word of God | Part 1

Are you certain that the Bible is the Word of God? Listen to Adrian Rogers. You've got to be able to say, I know that I know that the Bible is the Word of God, and especially in these days when everything that is not nailed down is coming loose, and the devil is pulling nails as fast as he can.

Welcome to Love Worth Finding. Pastor, teacher, and author Adrian Rogers says, if you want to be an exclamation point rather than a question mark, then you need to be certain the Bible is the Word of God. You know, there's an ongoing war over God's Word. Some people try to come up against it. They despise the Scripture.

They try to dissect it or disregard it. But perhaps the greatest casualty of this war is the one who believes in the Bible but doesn't know it. Our salvation and sanctification depend on it. If you have your Bible, turn now to Revelation chapter 22 as Adrian Rogers reveals five ways you can be certain that the Bible is the Word of God. I'm speaking today on how you can be certain that the Bible is the Word of God. It is absolutely imperative that you be certain about the Bible.

You'll never get much of anything else settled until you get that settled. Your salvation depends upon it because the Bible says you're born again by the Word of God. Your sanctification depends upon it.

Jesus said, sanctify them through thy truth. Thy Word is truth. Your usefulness depends upon it. God has given you the Word that you might be a workman that needs not to be ashamed.

Your assurance depends upon it. These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God that you might know that you have eternal life if you want to be an exclamation point rather than a question mark. Then you need to be certain that the Bible is the Word of God. Now listen to how the Bible itself concludes.

Verse 18, God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city and from the things which are written in this book. That book, my friend, is the Word of God, the Bible. Now there is a war over the Word.

There is, in a very real sense, a battle for the Bible. Now there are those who despise it. They just simply hate God's Word. They are against all that they stand for. They are despisers of the Bible.

Then there are those who don't despise it. They just deny it. They say, I don't believe the Bible is the Word of God, and there are some of those. And then there are those who distort it. The Bible is put in their hands, but they twist it to their own destruction. Then there are those who dissect it. They come to the Bible with their measuring rod, with their scaffold, with their test tubes, and they treat the Bible more like a math book than a love story.

And they're ever learning, but they're never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. There are those who disregard it. They say, well, it's really not relevant. It's not important. Forget all of that religious hocus-pocus.

We have got to do something about the social situation. And so they spend all of their energy making the world a better place to go to hell from. They don't have theology. They have meology. They're just simply thinking about themselves, not thinking about the future.

But thinking about right now and even not coming up with the right answers for right now. But I suppose that the greatest enemy of the Word of God is found in places like this one this morning. These are they who say they believe the Bible.

These are they who give lip service to the fact that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, authentic Word of God. And so they put on it, these hath God married, and no man shall part, dust on the Bible, and drought in the heart. Now, you've got to be able to say, I know that I know that the Bible is the Word of God, and especially in these days, when everything that is not nailed down is coming loose.

And the devil is pulling nails as fast as he can. There's some things, really no thing, that he will be able to disturb you if you can stand on this book. God has given you the Word of God. I want to give you five reasons that I know the Bible is the Word of God, and five reasons that you can know, K-N-O-W, that the Bible is the Word of God. And I want to start with a reason that is the point of attack by most people.

I just want to turn it on its head. The Bible is the Word of God because of its scientific accuracy, because of its scientific accuracy. Now, the skeptic or the atheist or the unbeliever or the liberal says, well, of course, the Bible has scientific errors in it. Before you say that, you'd better make certain that you know two things. Number one, that you know science.

And number two, that you know the Bible. It's an old-fashioned book. It's not a book of science. It's a book of religion.

Well, that is true. It is not a scientific textbook. It is not written to teach you science. It's written to teach you God. It's well been said the Bible was not given to tell us how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven.

But the God of creation and the God of salvation are the same God. Science doesn't take God by surprise, and you don't have to check your brain because it leans at the door to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and indeed, it is scientifically accurate. Now, every now and then, science may disagree with the Bible. Well, just give the scientists time.

Maybe they'll catch up. Now, I don't say that facetiously. In 1861, a French academy of science printed a little brochure. And in that brochure, they gave 51 incontrovertible scientific facts that prove that the Bible is an error.

They printed that. It looked bad for the Bible. That was about 130 years ago. Today, there is not a reputable scientist who believes one of their so-called facts.

It's not the Bible that has changed. It is science that is catching up with the Word of God. Now, there's certain things that you and I take for granted scientifically. For example, in the world that we live in, the cosmology of our world, we take it for granted, don't we, that this earth is suspended in space.

We take that for granted. This celestial ball, as we call it, is floating in space. Well, how did you know that? Did you figure it out? Oh, no. You simply stand upon the knowledge of other people. There's no way that you could know that unless you'd been taught or you have learned through modern invention. If you had gone back, for example, to Job's time, the oldest piece of literature known to man, you would not have known that. The ancient Egyptians used to think that the earth was supported on the back of five pillars. Now, the Egyptians, they were wise. They were learned. They were erudite. But they said, well, the earth is on these five pillars.

That's the best they knew. Well, the Greeks, the sophisticated Greeks, do you know what they believed? They believed that the earth was on the back of a great giant. His name was Atlas who held the world on his shoulders. You've seen pictures of Atlas.

With the world on his shoulders. And in the sacred writings of the ancient Hindus, they used to believe that the earth was on the backs of elephants. And you can still see pictures describing the earth. They're resting on the backs of these elephants. And when the elephants would shake, that would be an earthquake. Well, somebody said, but wait a minute.

That doesn't answer the question. What are those elephants standing on? They had an answer. They said, well, the elephants are on the back of a huge tortoise. They came along and said, but tell us, what does the tortoise rest on? Well, they had an answer. They said the tortoise is resting upon a huge coiled serpent. But then another thinker came along and said, but what is the serpent resting on? And they had an answer. They said, he is swimming in a cosmic sea.

So it was settled. There's the earth resting on a snake that is resting upon a tortoise that is resting upon elephants. Aren't you glad you don't pick up the Bible and read any of that in the Word of God?

I'll tell you what you can read. You can read in the Word of God in Job chapter 26 and verse 7 that he hangeth the earth upon nothing. Don't you love that? He, God, hangeth the earth upon nothing. Now, how did Job know that before the age of modern astronomy and space travel?

Well, holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. They did it for granted, not to be argued about that the earth is round. 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And when I was a little boy in school, they told me that they told Columbus, you better be careful.

You will sail off the edge and fall into who knows what. But Columbus proved to the satisfaction of many that the earth is a sphere, a globe. But men did not always know that. The scientists of Isaiah's day, and Isaiah wrote about 750 years before Christ, and they did know that. But Isaiah said by divine inspiration in Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 22 that God sits upon the circle of the earth. And the word for circle there is not the word for circle like you would draw a circle in plain geometry.

It's the word for sphere, a globe. It is God that sits upon the globe of the earth. Now, how did Job know that the earth is suspended in space?

How did Isaiah know that it is a ball, a globe? Well, how? By divine inspiration.

That is how. The year was 150 B.C. The man, Hipparchus.

What did he do? He was an astronomer. He studied the stars.

One day, wearily, he rubbed his eyes, put down his pencil, gave a sigh. He had charted the heavens and numbered the stars. He had counted the stars one by one, and he came up with this conclusion. There are 1,022 stars. Now, friend, that was science. 1,022 stars. 150 years before Christ, they had those stars numbered. Well, that was science for 250 years. But then along came another man who charted the heavens. This man's name was Ptolemy. And when he learned that Hipparchus said there were 1,022 stars, he laughed. He said, that's ridiculous. I have counted the stars.

There are 1,026. Found four more stars. And it wasn't until 1,300 years later that a young medical student named Galileo invented his first crude telescope and turned it up to the heavens.

And when he did, he gave a gasp. For beyond the stars that could be seen with the naked eye were more stars. And beyond those, more stars and millions and millions and uncounted stars.

And today, with our great telescopes, we peer into the nether realms of space and we find galaxy tumbling upon galaxy and stars upon stars and billions and billions and billions of stars. In a journal I read, one scientist estimated there are more than 12 octillion stars in our known universe. How many is an octillion? Well, he said, that's more than there are grains of sand on all the seashores of all of the earth. Now, if you want to know how many that is, just go to my hometown of Palm Beach, Florida, and get a city block and begin to count. Find out how many grains of sand there are on the seashore of a city block of beach there at Palm Beach.

And then just multiply that by all of the seashores of all of the earth. Now, we're in the past, outer reaches of space, but had these men learned what the Word of God said, they could have laid down their pencil a long time ago because Jeremiah 33, verse 22 says the host of heaven cannot be numbered. No man will ever count the stars.

You just can't number the stars. Leave cosmology and go with me to biology. And think about what the Bible teaches us. It teaches about these bodies of ours. You know, the Bible says we're fearfully and wonderfully made, but it wasn't until the year 1615 that William Harvey discovered that the blood circulates in the human body. People didn't know that before. They did not know even that the heart pumps the blood, and it is called a red river of life.

When I was in college, I took human anatomy and physiology, and I learned all of the life processes that are carried on through the blood. But men didn't always know this. As a matter of fact, they often had the idea that if a person was sick, it was probably bad blood. Now, there are indeed diseases of the blood, but the way they would treat even unrelated diseases would be to bleed a person.

And that barber pole that you see, that's not a peppermint candy. They would bleed a person to see if he would get well. That's the way George Washington, the father of our country died. He had a respiratory illness. They bled him. He didn't get well. They bled him again.

He didn't get well. They bled him the third time and bled him to death, the father of our country. Today, they may have given him a blood transfusion.

To get even, the politicians have been bleeding us to death ever since. Now, these people, if they had gone to the Word of God, could have seen in Leviticus chapter 17, and verse 14, that the life of the flesh is the blood. Now, no hematologist on earth can say it any better than God has succinctly said it.

The life of the flesh is in the blood. Now, there came in Europe, a thing called the plague, the black plague in the 14th century. It decimated the population. One out of every four people died. Count them. One, two, three, dead. One, two, three, dead. One, two, three, dead. One, two, three, dead. An estimated 60 million died in the plague. They did not know what to do.

They tried everything, laughable ideas. People were frightened to death. The stench of death was everywhere. And nobody knew what to do. And it was not the scientists who brought the plague to an end.

It was the church. They learned from the Word of God for themselves. Now, finally, what you and I take for granted, and that is the principle of quarantining. Leviticus chapter 13, verse 46, God says this, All the days wherein the plague shall be in him, he shall be defiled, he is unclean, he shall dwell alone without the camp or outside the camp shall his habitation be. Now, those people did not know microbiology. I mean, they did not know what a microbe was, a germ is, what a virus is. They had no way of knowing that. But Moses, through divine inspiration, said, Listen, this man is to be separated. He is to be quarantined. How does the Word of God come up with that?

Holy men of God speak as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. There was a physician in Vienna whose name was Semmelweis. Semmelweis was in charge of a hospital in Vienna. And in that hospital, they were having difficulty with women who were coming in for examinations as they had conceived and getting ready to deliver a child. And physicians would do these examinations. But one out of six of the mothers would die from infection.

Semmelweis tried to find out what was wrong. And he noticed that the doctors were going from the morgue where they would do pathological studies and postmortems and autopsies. And they would go from the morgue into the maternal examining room without even washing the hands.

There's a connection there. He said, From now on, you must wash your hands when you leave the morgue. Oh, what a hue and cry went up.

That's going to slow us down. Too difficult. But they washed their hands. And then they went in, and the death rate dropped from one in six. The death rate dropped right down to one in 84.

But then there were 11 out of 12 mothers who died, mothers to be. In a row. Semmelweis got to thinking about that. He said, Now not only will you wash when you come from the morgue, but you will wash between every examination. Now what surgeon today? What doctor today would not scrub? Of course he would.

Why? Because he knows about germs. He knows about microbes.

He knows all about that. But they didn't know that in that day. But listen to what the Bible says in Numbers chapter 19, verse 14 and following. When a man dieth in a tent, all that is come into the tent, and all that is in the tent shall be unclean seven days. And every open vessel, which hath no covering bound upon it, is unclean. And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a sword in the open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days. And on the seventh day he shall purify himself, wash his clothes, bathe himself in water, and shall be clean even at even. Do you see what he's talking about here?

There's running water. There is the quarantining. There's the setting aside.

There is the change of clothes. There's the time interval for the bacteria to die. Why? They didn't understand about germs, but germs did not take God by surprise. They were the root of many things. Now, why did not some of this business slip into the Bible about elephants and about snakes and about pillars and all that?

Why? Because holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Here's a second reason I believe the Bible is the Word of God. Not only because of the scientific accuracy, but the historical accuracy of the Bible. Now, just as the Bible is not primarily a book of science, it is not primarily a book of history, but it records history.

And all of the things that we believe took place in history, and so thank God for the historical accuracy of the Bible. Now, I have been quoting from what we call the Pentateuch. That's the first five books of the Bible.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That's the Pentateuch. And the Bible teaches that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Well, there's some scholars like Dr. Driver who was a linguist and a paleontologist who said, well, it's impossible that Moses could have written the Pentateuch because people didn't even know how to write when Moses was supposed to have been on earth.

And so the skeptics had a field day. But then one day in northern Egypt, Dr. Petrie and others unearthed some clay tablets. I studied about them when I was in school called the Tel El Amarna tablets.

I studied about them in high school, the Tel El Amarna tablets. And what they were were letters, transactions, business transactions, and others from people in Egypt to people in Palestine. And people in Palestine back to people in Egypt centuries before Moses was born. Not only did they know how to write, they had a postal system.

They were sending letters back and forth. But you see, you can trust the history of the Bible. There you'll find answers you may need about your faith.

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To utilize that study tool, find us at lwf.org slash radio. Well, thanks for studying in God's Word with us today. In this message, Adrian Rogers reminded us that the God of creation and the God of salvation are the same God.

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